Bianca Steele

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant; Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot is not the topic of this blog post.  My having finished the reading for the project I mentioned a little while back is.  I did start The Marriage Plot during a break in my reading when I couldn’t get the book I needed next from the library, and I wanted something new to read during an afternoon sick in bed.  I’m about halfway through it, but I put it down to finish the “project.”

I had picked up the first novel for the “project” in the library on a whim.  I thought it would be interesting to write about, but first I wanted to see what else the author wrote.  It turned out that while the first book was interesting (and brief), and the second was long and in a genre that was really not my kind of thing but a good read, the third was simply long.  The more I read it (and it took me a long time, since I could only read at most a chapter or two a day, which can’t have helped), the more I felt that (to paraphrase Wayne Booth) the implied author of this novel was someone I really did not want to spend time with. 

So when I finished, finally, the thought that passed through my head was, “I’m glad that’s over.”  That reminded me of the lines from T.S. Eliot (in the third section of “The Waste Land,” which he gave the title, “The Fire Sermon"):

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

The title of the post is from the same poem, and does almost seem appropriate (surely goatees are over by now).  And while Jeffrey Eugenides and his narrators are probably as far from being the young man carbuncular as can be imagined, I don’t think the idea of the author of a book as a person who is in the room with a reader, for as long as the book’s being read, is a bad one.  The idea of an author being a seducer, much less a rapist, maybe not, though.

Again looking for something light to read, I picked up a fairly recent collection of stories by Ursula Le Guin, Changing Planes, in the children’s section.  I like this passage, from the introductory story:

On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility.  In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape routes from hell.  These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats.

The passage is a good example of how Le Guin combines fiction that’s very interested in ideas with very precise, nearly pictorial descriptions.  She can sometimes be a little too abstract for my taste when she is narrating ordinary stories, but so far the pieces in this book are brief explorations of related ideas, for which her ability to describe people and places with pinpoint accuracy is very well suited.

Re-reading Madeleine L'Engle

Mari Ness at the Tor Books blog is reviewing Madeleine L'Engle's novels, in chronological order, beginning with her first young-adult book, published in 1949, And Both Were Young.  (UPDATE: Actually, she's not reading all of them, they won't be in strict chronological order, and And Both Were Young isn't L'Engle's first young-adult book.)  L’Engle is best known for her young-adult science fiction (somewhat in the C. S. Lewis vein), especially the Newberry Award winning A Wrinkle in Time.  But in addition to her more or less anglophilic young-adult novels, she wrote a handful of more or less anglophilic “women’s novels,” as well as a series of memoirs.  None of the adult novels have any science fiction elements, but the more interesting among them do verge on fantasy in the sense of depicting a real world on which things like ghosts and the occult have real effects.

I’ve enjoyed many of Ness’s posts discussing young-adult novels of yesteryear.  Her re-reads of Children of Morrow and Treasures of Morrow certainly brought back memories.

UPDATE: Here is the list of books that Ness will re-read.

Inception, a film written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Inception starts with a novel idea: that it’s possible to insert an idea in somebody else’s mind: and that it’s possible to induce someone to have a new idea that they will think is original but that is entirely engineered by you.  “Inception” is a word meaning “the implantation of an idea.”

In the film, it’s also possible to “extract” an idea from another person’s mind without their knowledge or cooperation.  (Basically, you trick them into looking at it in your presence, in a kind of mental structure you’ve designed for them.  No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.)  In the world of the film, both of these are done only through the technological means of a drug-induced sleep undertaken in close proximity to other sleepers with whom the dream is shared—not by means of such old-fashioned means as, you know, talking to people—and both are highly illegal.

This is a clear parallel to what a writer does, and even more, to what a novelist or a screenwriter might be said to do.  Writers of fiction make people believe things that are not true, often using emotional rhetorical devices or “tricks” to encourage people to believe things the words don’t even say and the screen doesn’t actually show.  Novels and films are quite often compared to dreams.

So the theme concerns what the writer does.  And in a certain kind of novel we might expect to find a considered reflection on writing and on fiction itself.  Not in Inception.  The film does not explore the details and implications of what the writer does or comment on it.  Christopher Nolan is interested in exploring the “how and why” of writing fiction up to a point, and no farther, and getting to this point actually doesn’t really take long.  The writer chooses an idea and tries to persuade people of it, maybe for admirable reasons, maybe for vicious ones.  That’s it.  If people believe it, their belief will affect the way they live, and when people come to realize that their beliefs are grounded in something other than reality (what that is doesn’t seem to matter too much as far as the movie goes, but it definitely is not as vicious or as horrific as what we have seen in the Matrix films), their realization will affect the way they live. 

So we have a Matrix-like philosophical dilemma about how we can ever know our lives and thoughts are real, and our own.  (It feels more like Synecdoche, New York than like the Matrix films, though, most of the time.)  The main character, Cobb (played by Leonardo Di Caprio), lives his life on the run from shadowy corporations—but the need for him to live in this way is questioned by other characters as sheer paranoia.  The world of Inception is a world where corporations hire teams to stalk, and in effect to brainwash, their rivals, in order to influence the rivals’ actions.  Rather than being slaves to a worldwide tyranny, as in The Matrix, in Inception we are subject at any moment to arbitrary treatment from little bands of people who spend most of their time in a dream world and demonstrate little concern for the long-term effects of what they do.  This would be much scarier—except that most of us aren’t important enough to merit that kind of attention.  So, in the end, this is just a silly film about how the comeuppances of the rich are brought about by self-declared super-detectives using super-technology.

But this doesn’t seem to be enough, so Nolan tricks out the science fiction plot with ruminations on love, marriage, parenthood, and men’s relationships with their own fathers.  (The father here is played by Michael Caine, inviting comparison with Nolan’s Batman films and with The Prestige.)  But this more humanistic story is told only in flashes.  Too much is left for the viewer to fill in, and ultimately the romantic plot is hollow.  Like the thriller plot, it seems to have been included only to give audiences the sense that they are seeing something familiar.

As an action film, Inception is slow, the plot is convoluted and self-important.  As a science fiction film, it’s pretty good.  As a film with ideas, though, the kind a good science fiction novel might have, it is lacking. One character (played by Lukas Haas, the little boy in Witness) is named Nash, and there’s a running joke about an unstable equilibrium, which is clever—the way Moonlighting once named Mexican bodyguards “Ortega” and “Gasset.”  If you think you can rework the images you get from this movie into anything resembling an idea, much less an argument, that’s up to you.

"All Summer in a Day"

It has been raining around Boston for a really long time, and the Globe editorial page is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s 1954 story, “All Summer in a Day,” which

describes a gloomy world where it rains all the time, and where the inhabitants see the sun for an hour every seven years. . . .  Bradbury’s story revolves around a maladjusted schoolgirl who’d emigrated from Earth. The mean Venusian kids lock her in a school closet, just as the long-hidden sun is about to peek out.”

Like a great deal of mid-century science fiction, Bradbury’s story is usually understood as a commentary on 1950s (McCarthyite, conformist) America, and in Bradbury’s writing, the science fiction foundation usually serves mostly as background for a rather conventional story, the kind of thing the Saturday Evening Review Post or Redbook might accept.  “All Summer in a Day,” accordingly, illustrates various truisms: Children (and by extension, people generally) can be cruel, especially to those who are different.  Careless actions can have serious consequences.  It can be more difficult to go without something one remembers having had, once, in the past, than never to have had that thing in the first place.  Some events, once done, cannot be reversed or repaired.  No one would quarrel with these statements, as possible “morals” for the story.

Without this historical and political context, however, the psychological meaning is outlined clearly, and the story might appear to be only about metaphorical darkness and a metaphorical “closet.”  That is not to say that the closet represents Margot’s denial of her own homosexuality, only to say that she is denying something.  Subjectively—from her own point of view—she feels “as if she has been locked in a closet and cannot get out to see the sun.”  But a closet is always something one puts oneself in, never the fault of another.  By depicting Margot’s suffering in the closet as having been caused by the deliberate actions of another person (a person whose overt intentions were malicious towards her), the story appears to be a fantasy, written from Margot’s point of view, improperly relieving herself of responsibility for her own actions.

It is not necessary to read the story as written from the child’s point of view.  It could be read from the point of view of an adult who cares about children, or of any adult generally who thinks scapegoating and bullying are wrong.  It could be read as speaking from the omniscient, or “God’s eye,” point of view.  However, the omniscient stance is unfashionable these days (and since fiction writers are themselves not omniscient, the idea of pretending they can represent omniscience raises questions).

Without knowing the convention that stories like this one are expected to present a unique, even eccentric individual, and ask the reader to “identify with” him or her for the duration of the reading, there is actually little reason why one might not read the story from the point of view of someone who sympathizes more with the schoolhouse bullies than with Margot.  Bradbury even provides hints as to how that might be done.  The other children are excellently adapted to their gloomy world, where they hardly ever see the sun they don’t remember in the slightest, where the rain creates such oppressively effusive growth.  They take real joy in their two hours of sunlit outdoor play, and can expect similarly ecstatic joy at regular intervals, even if those intervals are for children unimaginably long.  Margot makes them feel bad about what little they have even though she can really expect no better—she makes herself feel bad about what is really pretty good.

However, that reading emphasizes our feelings about what the characters “are like,” as if they were real people, over and above the actions that actually form part of the narrative.  It discounts narrative (in the sense of story, of actions the characters engage in, and way they interact with one another), viewing it as an unavoidable obstacle to expressing what the author supposedly really wants to say.

Also, the interpretation I’ve offered is almost certainly not compatible with Bradbury’s intentions in writing the story.  At best, Bradbury’s probable libertarian streak—incompatible, as he illustrates, with the prevailing mores of society—could be understood as a pathology: to preserve the interpretation that the story is a criticism of society, it could become a criticism of the way society failed to prevent this pathology.  That is obviously ridiculous—maybe there’s a theoretical way to express it that makes it sound better, though I hope not.  Whatever one thinks about “authorial intention” as a guide to interpretation, it is undeniable that someone who interpreted “All Summer in a Day” in that way would be incapable of understanding Bradbury’s work as a whole (what would become of works like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles?), and probably also incapable of understanding most popular or “genre” writing of the period.

(Via Wikipedia: It seems that the US Department of Defense has placed “All Summer in a Day” online for the use of K-6 educators worldwide.  Is this really a story for ten- and eleven-year-olds?  Apart from what the television censors call the “thematic content” of the piece, most sixth-graders are still reading from children’s books and from textbooks specially written to be level-appropriate.)

Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

The overall structure of The Cleft uses the well known frame of “the discovered document.” An elderly former civil servant, living in the time of Nero, has inherited (from a society to which he belongs) a packet of historical documents concerning the secret origin of the human race. Like many before him, he has set himself the task of editing and collating these texts into some humanly readable and comprehensible form. The novel alternates his comments about the texts and about his life with the texts themselves.

These texts tell of a time when women and men lived in entirely separate communities. By historical accident, the surviving stories are related primarily from the women’s point of view, but the Roman narrator describes the process by which the tales were investigated and corrected, by groups including both sexes. Basically, the men live barbarically in a clearing in the woods, while the women live by the sea. The women give birth only to girl children -- most of the time. Occasionally, for reasons unknown, a monster is produced: a male. When that happens, the women take the child to a mountaintop and leave it there to be rescued by enormous eagles.

Inevitably, one day a young female follows the eagles and finds the men. Inevitably, she bears a child. Inevitably, although the older females disapprove to the point of eventually exiling them from the community, other young females do the same. And inevitably, the old way of life is destroyed; the new society that has come to take its place is difficult and frightening, and if a more acceptable equilibrium is ever going to arise, it is not obvious how this might ever occur.

The reviewers described The Cleft as a feminist science fiction novel. On that basis, I did not expect to like it -- not because I don’t like science fiction (though I don’t read it much these days), and certainly not because I object to feminism -- although Lessing has been attacked for both those reasons. Rather, I assumed that Lessing’s novel would end up belonging to a category of British novels that the critics often term “science fiction novels” but that in reality are nothing of the kind. My prediction turned out to be correct, yet I did like the novel, so I spent some time thinking about why -- about what made the novel worth reading despite its being a kind of novel I most frequently don‘t like. I didn’t find a good answer to this question, but I did, I think, come up with an explanation of why I’m still ambivalent.

The usual complaint about fiction like this would be, Lessing is not “telling a story.” She is illustrating a philosophical theory. It is true that Aristotle described literature as philosophical, because like philosophy it treats of universals. However, we expect a writer to have accomplished the hard work of turning a philosophical idea into something appropriately concrete: an image, perhaps, in the case of a poem, and a story with characters in the case of a novel. Moreover, we expect a novel to have a certain kind of characters and story, something we can recognize, something everyday and ordinary. This is a reasonable objection, if it fits.

This requirement does not necessarily shut out all possible science fiction novels as possible (good) novels. Science fiction novels may have plots and stories that we can recognize easily as such. Caves of Steel, for example, is a detective novel. “I Sing the Body Electric” is simply a story about children and the process of mourning. That both stories are “about” androids or robots means only that the authors decided to imagine a society in which robots were commonplace, and to see how an ordinary sort of story might play out in this kind of world.

And Lessing’s science fiction novels certainly do tell stories. The plots are complex and the characters are roundly and sensitively drawn. Thus, the complaint that her novels are “philosophical” or “polemical” seems to express a preference for novels that lack any discernable trace of any idea whatsoever. It is felt that in science fiction novels -- among others -- the ideas do not remain sufficiently safely submerged in the depths of the author’s mind, but rather bob close enough to the surface that they can be seen from above. It seems, to me, that that is no more than a preference, held by critics and readers who just like other kinds of novels better and don’t wish to pick up the other kind by mistake. Those readers are wrong to describe novels they don’t like as little better than propaganda, just because they are the kind of novels they don’t like.

But Lessing -- like some other English novelists, including P.D. James and Kazuo Ishiguro -- does seem confused about what science fiction is. Lessing does not imagine a world, the general parameters of which are different from our own, and place an ordinary human story in this world, the better to illustrate the effects of those parameters on human action. She does exactly the opposite. She imagines a world exactly like our own, with one single exception: the sacred texts describe the origin of humanity as a singular event that merged two separate species into one society.

There are many things to admire about The Cleft. It has -- in my opinion -- all the merits of a good novel of the usual type. In addition to this, it makes you think. My question is, does Lessing make the reader think too much? After all, what is the reader supposed to be thinking about? We expect the writer to have done the hard work of making her ideas concrete and comprehensible: this applies, as well, to her science fiction world inventions, which ought not to seem entirely arbitrary. Science fiction does not comprise every possible literary means of getting around societal constraints concerning what may and may not be said, and it is not simply a lesser form of fiction that may permit the novelist to skip steps and cut corners whenever this is desired. By allowing her book to be labeled “science fiction,” but leaving out some of the essential elements of a science fiction story, the novelist avoids having to indicate how her imagined world might relate to the real one, while actually preventing the reader from raising questions about this in the usual way.

Science Fiction and Mad-Scientist Stories

Via Bill Benzon at The Valve, the philosopher of biology John Wilkins remembers the science fiction he no longer admires as much as he used to as being mostly mad-scientist novels:

Frankenstein is the model of the SF scientist, meddling where he (usually a he - SF was very masculine for a long time) had no right to meddle. . . .  [M]ost SF showed science in a very apocalyptic and dangerous aspect, as befitted the post A-bomb era.

I'm with those of the commenters who think Wilkins has been reading different SF than we have. I've wondered whether this is to some extent a difference between American and British science fiction (for example, compare "literary" novelists in both countries who have written "science fiction" novels). I don't remember a lot of mad scientists in the science fiction I used to read. True, again unlike Wilkins, I don't remember a lot of sex in the books either, in the SF I found in the middle school library or was given by my uncle (in fact I stopped reading SF around age 13, when I started looking elsewhere and found more male sex fantasies than I had much interest in).

I remember plenty of medievalism, and a good dose of metaphysics, but where could Wilson be finding mysticism (especially mysticism of a kind that might lead a reader to religion!)? And why doesn't he realize that social criticism is an integral part of the genre?

Sure, you could force lots of classic SF into Wilson's schema, if it suited you to do that. So Asimov's story "Buy Jupiter" would be a condemnation of scientists for being liable to invent neon advertisements that can be installed on large gaseous planets to be seen by space tourists flying past. And Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles would be a condemnation of scientists for always destroying indigenous cultures. And Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven would be a condemnation of scientists for having values that logically lead to legislating universal compulsory ingestion of pills. And some story I read in Omni twenty-five years ago would be a condemnation of scientists for allowing young teenagers to become sexually active, thwarting an old man who finds his pre-teen lover has an equally young rival for her affections. But something would be missing.

Could this be explained by a split between the kind of science fiction popular in the UK (and maybe also Australia, about which I don't know a lot), and what is considered science fiction in the United States? You do see a difference in the literary novels that are called SF. In North America, we have The Handmaid's Tale and Galatea 2.0, which think seriously through current trends in science or social change, and deeply imagine a whole world or a new technology. In England, there are The Children of Men and The Cleft. I have looked and looked in The Children of Men and can find nothing at all about science; nothing that explains what caused the social or biological changes that form the basis of the plot; and little (except for that one superficial plot gimmick) that distinguishes the society of the novel from the England of today. The novel is a dystopian fantasy, but this single fact doesn't make it science fiction.  That James and the reviewers thought it was would seem to mean they define "science fiction" somehow differently.

(Yes, Atwood is Canadian, but she is writing about the United States.)